


Burning Bridges

by QueenBuzzle



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, mentions of mpreg, mentions of original characters - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-16
Updated: 2013-10-16
Packaged: 2017-12-29 13:19:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1005901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenBuzzle/pseuds/QueenBuzzle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco Malfoy regrets that night five years ago, when he banished Harry from his home and disowned his unborn child.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Bridges

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first work on AO3. I finally decided to post here after my laptop was stolen, along with all of my writing...
> 
> The three boys mentioned are Teddy Lupin and Harry&Fred's sons, Brennan and Johnathon. Their names aren't important but I did name them so I wanted you to know.

 

                “Are you stalking him, now?”

                Draco looked up from the point he’d been avidly focusing on, across the park. Pansy Parkinson was now seated next to him, _staring_ at him, the look in her eyes something akin to pity. Had it been anyone else, he would have vehemently denied any and all crude accusations—but, as it were, Pansy held no false illusions about him, his thoughts, or otherwise.

                “It was actually a complete coincidence that I’m here at the same time as they are,” Draco murmured, not quite looking her in the eyes. “Caelum wanted to go to the park.”

                He motioned halfheartedly to the content little boy swinging on the swing-set. He was alone in a group of children, platinum blond hair and bright, gray eyes screaming his parentage just as well as his surname might have.

                “Draco,” she said, disapprovingly. She probably wanted him to correct himself, but he was sticking to his story. “You and I both know that this park is fifteen miles from your home, at _least—_ whereas Pixie’s Pass is just a five minute walk.”

                He pursed his lips and did not respond, eyes drifting back over to the family he’d been watching. It was comprised of two fathers (not as uncommon as it may have been in the muggle civilization), three sons and two daughters. Nothing was odd about them—perhaps a larger-than-average amount of children, but plenty of families had jumped onto the baby bandwagon since the war had ended—his parents (and himself) included.

                No, there wasn’t anything odd _about_ them. But as the redheaded father laughed boisterously, lifting the blonde daughter high into the air, listening to her shriek: “Look Daddy! Look! I’m a _aiiirplane_!”, a pang went through Draco’s very being.

                “That should be me,” he told Pansy quietly. “I should be over there, lifting up those children. Caelum should be with them, instead of playing by himself.”

                Pansy shook her head. “Draco, you made your decision years ago”

                “I was angry! I had been so _careful_ , and for nothing!”

                “Hot words burn bridges,” his longtime friend tutted. “For what it’s worth, I _am_ sorry, but you _need_ to get over him. You’ve got your son and Caelum to worry about, and he’s got a family now. It’s no use dwelling on your fantasies and ‘what ifs’.”

                Draco shook his head dejectedly at the mention of his son and his younger brother. “Pans, I’m worried. I am honestly worried. I… Astoria. Scorpius is with her now, the divorce is—well, it’s going in her favor, the judges are biased because she was never in any gray area during the war and I—well, I was. Har—Potter’s gotten my parents a full pardon, which means they’ll probably try for custody of Caelum soon. What will I do if I—?”

                He couldn’t help but feel as if all of this could have been avoided if, all those years ago, he’d chosen differently.

 

                “You’re not kidding.”

                Harry, nineteen, stood before Draco with the disheveled look of someone who’d rolled out of bed to bad news and hadn’t bothered getting round for the day. He was still a bit _too_ thin, too short, more of a boy than a man. His shirt, probably a Small, pouched a bit in the front and his jeans were hanging off his hipbones. He didn’t look impressive. But that’s the thing—the least impressive people are often the ones who impress you the most.

                “I wouldn’t joke about this, Dray.”

                Draco nodded numbly.

                He’d known that they weren’t exclusive—in fact, that had been a condition of their arrangement, set by Draco himself. He had no room for exclusion, he was being married off in who-knows-how-many days, to a girl he probably had never even met. He couldn’t put himself, or whatever lovers he decided to take, through that.

                But—all in all, he hadn’t really expected _Harry,_ of all people, to have a lover on the side. It actually _bothered_ Draco in a way that, in turn, bothered him for being bothered. Was he not good enough? Was he lacking in some area that a half-blood—excuse him, _Blood Traitor_ \--like Weasley was not?

                His blood boiled. He was so much _better_ than the Weasleys, why had Harry gone and done this? Why couldn’t he have been careful, like Draco? Didn’t he know any better?

                That’s what it all simmered down to, in the end—Harry _didn’t_ know better. He’d come into the Wizarding World at age eleven, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, knowing nothing of their culture…and nobody had decided it was important that he be briefed on—well, on anything. And it wasn’t really his _fault,_ because you can’t remedy something if you don’t know what’s wrong with it, but it _was_ his problem.

                “Well—I guess we’ll be getting married, then,” Draco had said. He smiled thinly, not quite happy but neither was he disheartened. He hadn’t really _wanted_ to marry someone he did not choose…and while this was not the ideal circumstance, well. He’d take it.

                Harry was having none of it.

                “I’m not just marrying you because I could, possibly, be carrying your child!” Harry shouted, stepping away from Draco. “Just because it takes two of you to get me—well, you know—doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily carrying your child. They could both be his!”

                “And—if one, or both, of them are mine?”

                Harry looked at him a tad reluctantly, probably trying to come up with a snide remark of some sort. He really was not suited to them, that pretty little mouth was made to draw people up, not knock them down.

                “If either of them are yours, we’ll talk,” Harry decided, patting his tummy soothingly.

                “There will be no talking,” Draco said shortly. “You can’t paternity test an unborn child, and I can’t claim a bastard as an heir. I _have_ to claim my firstborn as my heir, or else the Malfoy vaults automatically pass my bloodline over. So either we get married and I claim the child—children, or we do not get married and the children never know the difference.”

                He’d hoped that argument would suffice. He’d hoped Harry would understand and marry him, just to avoid a mess.

                Hoping was not enough.

                “Well, I’m sorry then. I’m not marrying you.”

                That’s when his temper really hit. Harry had always been so bloody rebellious, why couldn’t he just _fall in line_ for once?

                “So you’re just going to crawl back to that Blood Traitor with _my_ child and beg for him to take your sorry arse in?” he spat.

                “Better him than you!”

                “Funny of you to think that any self-respecting business owner would want a pregnant, unwed, _teenage_ slag hanging around him.”

                That look, that betrayed, hurt look in Harry’s big green eyes had almost made Draco stop there. If he had, maybe they’d still be on speaking terms. But he hadn’t. It wasn’t enough to hurt Harry. He had to completely wreck everything, every single time. _Hot words burn bridges,_ Pansy said. But even burning the bridge was not enough—he had needed to incinerate it, watch it crumble to ashes without ever having hope of it being repaired.

                “He’ll just turn you out on your arse, too. Maybe you’d have been better off going the same way your dear parents did, then this never would have happened. I actually feel sorry for the poor bloke, you’ll be ruining his life, yeah? Get out of here, Potter. I don’t ever want you, or your offspring, darkening my doorstep again.”

                Harry didn’t even say anything. He just stood there, hands still on his flat belly, face turned toward the floor, and sniffled. Then he turned, jerkily, like he couldn’t remember which functions to access to make use of his limbs. And he was gone, just like that.

                His father pointed out his mistake later, over dinner.

                By telling Potter to leave, and saying that he didn’t want Potter’s offspring “darkening his doorstep”, it would be seen as disowning his probable child/children. Magically disowning one’s child gives one no rights to the child, at all.

                So when the Potter twins were born in February of the following year, just a scant month after Caelum was born, Draco was not permitted into the hospital to visit them. He was not allowed to view their birth certificates, he was not allowed to know their names, their hospital records, if they had been taken down in the Book of Names at Hogwarts…

                It’d been five entire years. The girls had turned five on February 10th, 2005, and though he had no “official” documents informing him of their parentage, it was rather blatant for anyone to see.

                One girl had flaming red hair. The other had platinum blond hair.

               

                The Potter family was rather adept at keeping out of the spotlight now. With Teddy, it had been more difficult—the war had just ended, Harry was only eighteen, he didn’t know about minors’ rights. Pictures of Theodore Remus Lupin were in the paper every week, information (mostly false) about how he was growing making headlines as “the Savior’s Godson” and all that. Andromeda Tonks had taught Harry very quickly how to keep Teddy away from the leaches, so to speak.

                Within weeks of Harry bringing down 57 (the amount of times Teddy had been in the paper) counts of infringement of minor’s privacy, publication of purposeful falsities, photography without consent, and even stalking, the _Daily Prophet_ stopped publishing articles about the child. Most of the charges got dropped, but the warning had worked.

                Now, that didn’t mean they’d stopped harassing Harry. Harry was still in the papers periodically, he couldn’t stop that, but he’d scared the _Daily Prophet_ so badly that there was no longer any falsehoods to the articles. The pictures taken of him were only with his consent, and he had been told by law enforcement that he was well within his rights to hex paparazzi if they refused to leave him be. So, with the articles on his terms, there was not often anything to “report.”

They’d run a few stories while he was pregnant with the girls: “ **The Boy-Who-Lived-to be a-Dad?** ” (“ _Harry Potter, 19, confirms that he_ is _expecting a child, due early next year…)_ and “ **Reports of Savior’s Confirmations on Parentage are _False_** ” ( _“Harry Potter, 20, tells_ The Daily Prophet’s _Moran Jones that he is not now, nor will he in the near future, be reporting the parentage of his children except to close family. George Weasley, 22, of Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes, says: “If Harry wants it kept under wraps, we’ll keep it under wraps.”)_ and, finally: “ **Harry Potter, The Boy-Who-Lived, Welcomes Twin Daughters!** ” ( _Born in early February, ushered into the world by only Potter himself, his boyfriend, Fred Weasley, 22, and a private Healer, the Potter twins have finally been born! It’s been five weeks since their birth. Potter says, “We wanted a relative down-time before letting the world know. Fred and I told his family two days after they were born and we, you know, just enjoyed some family time for the last few weeks…”)_

While the Prophet _had_ run stories about Harry and Teddy, there had not been a single article about any of Harry’s biological children. Draco knew this to be because Harry had so severely threatened the organization that they feared for their metaphorical cocks, but the Wizarding public honestly believed that the Prophet was “respecting” Harry’s “privacy.”

In fact, the Prophet had “respected” Harry’s “privacy” so much that the general public still did not know Harry’s children’s names.

Including Draco.

He’d often tried to figure the name of his daughter out—honestly he didn’t care about the other three, they would never be his—but it was to no avail. Nobody who knew it would tell him, and whether it was because they _couldn’t_ or because they didn’t _want_ towas unknown. So he had, yes, been “stalking” the Potter family for quite a while now in an attempt to figure it out and…

Well, just because he regretted it. He regretted it all—not trying to work things out with Harry, disowning his daughter, getting married to Astoria and having a son who hated him, taking in Caelum when his parents were arrested after a raid on their house…

Caelum was a lovely child. He really was. But Astoria had hated Draco for taking him in (not that he cared, because he loved his little brother to the ends of the earth), and that initial hatred had been what sparked their divorce. She’d poisoned Scorpius’ mind—the four-year-old was so agreeable, if she told him that cows were purple and his dad killed unicorns for fun, he’d believe her. She’d even given the family court judges some sob story about how he “didn’t take care of her” and how he “neglected Scorpius in favor of Caelum”.

It was difficult, trying to win favor when everyone was so eager to be against you.

 

“I know it’s hard, sweetie,” Pansy was saying, her hand on his shoulder. He tuned in, noticing that the wee Potters had gone to play on the swings. Caelum was watching them interestedly, noting, no doubt, how Harry and Fred Weasley followed them immediately. “But you can’t live your life wallowing in what-ifs.”

Draco found himself nodding. He watched Harry and Fred push their young ones, laughing, and watched Caelum sit up on his knees in the seat of the swing. Harry looked over, smiling delicately, and Draco could hear Caelum cry, “Caelum too?” from all the way over here.

“Let’s give you a proper push, sweet,” Harry’s voice carried on the wind. “Sit down, now, we don’t want you falling off, yeah?”

“Daddy gives the _best_ pushes,” said the redheaded girl to Caelum, nodding knowingly. Caelum looked at Harry wonderingly, then scurried happily to sit on his bum. Harry pulled the swing all the way back, so that Caelum was directly over his head, and then ran forward, still holding onto the swing, letting go when he got so far forward that he could no longer hold the swing. Caelum swept backward, shrieking in absolute _joy._

Draco had never heard Caelum make such a noise.

But he continued to shriek and giggle, and Harry and Fred looked on with such _adoration_ for a child that was not theirs that it nearly killed Draco inside.

“Look at them,” he whispered to Pansy, turning his face away. “Even my own little brother likes them better than me.”

“Oh, don’t start throwing yourself a pity-party. They just know how to handle kids better than you do. I’m sure Caelum likes you just fine.”

As if being summoned, Caelum let out a shrieked “Draco! Look at me, Draco!”

He looked. He couldn’t stop looking, even as Harry did a double-take between the duo. Pansy elbowed Draco, hissing that he should respond to Caelum.

“Uh—looking good, Cael!” his voice broke somewhere in the middle, both because he was unsure of what he was supposed to be saying and because he’d been spotted.

                Harry gave a jilted step forward, like all those years ago when he’d left Malfoy Manor for the last time. Pansy half-rose.

                “I—uh, I should go.”

                “You’re not leaving me for the wolves, are you?” Draco begged, turning his face to look up at her as she hurriedly gathered her bags.

                “I just really don’t want to be part of this conversation,” she responded, turning and waving as she left.

                The little redheaded girl wanted to play with Cael. Cael had never had a playmate his age—Astoria wouldn’t allow Scorpius to play with him, giving some excuse about ‘inter-generational-play’. He looked so delighted that it broke Draco’s heart, watching them run off to the play-scape together.

                Harry sank down next to Draco, silently. All of Draco’s nerve endings flared to life, screaming about their closeness. Though it was April, it was still rather chilly, and Harry was wearing a coat and scarf to detail that fact. He was no longer as thin and young as he’d been back at the Manor, he’d grown into his pointy little elbows and his clothing fit him properly. He was still too short though, probably five-five or five-six.

                For a little while, neither of them spoke. They watched Fred push the blond child— _Draco’s_ child—and the three little boys on the swings. They spotted the redhead and Caelum playing on the slides. Five, almost six, years of animosity fell between them, just filling the silence.

                Then: “Hi.”

                He smiled. “Hi.”

                Harry glanced up at Draco, sighing. “So—are you done being a prat, now?”

                Draco wanted to say “I’m sorry.” He wanted to nod and hug Harry, beg his forgiveness. But he didn’t. He just said, “Yes.”

                “D’you think you’d want to meet her?”

                They both turned their eyes to the little girl, who was now on her knees digging in the still-slightly-frozen sand. Her white leggings were ruined, her pretty up-do falling free of its bindings, but she looked happy.

                “Why are you being so kind? After what I did to you…”

                Harry shook his head, giving one, short, laugh. “Draco, if I let everything everyone said get to me, I’d be in an asylum somewhere. Granted, you were out of line, and it really hurt...but I’m grown up now. I’m not a scared little kid, running from the truth. I like my life. I’m willing to get over it.”

                “Does she—?”

                “She knows that Fred’s not her father,” Harry hummed, shuffling his feet a little. “She still calls him Dad, though. We’ll tell her who you are when she’s older. We’re not sadistic, Draco. We acknowledge that—if it hadn’t been for you—we’d never have Penny.”

                Wizard pregnancies took a lot of magic to create and sustain. Mostly, only very, very powerful wizards could become pregnant, and even then, it took _two_ other wizards to sufficiently conceive a child, because the amount of magic it takes to properly rearrange the necessary organs is incredible. But for every lover the Carrier has, the “base” number of fetuses conceived rises—with one lover, you’d normally have just one baby. But with two, you get fraternal twins.

                There’s another way, too—a fertility potion that basically “lends” a magical signature for the time being, in order to have enough magic to conceive. Draco assumed this was how the two little boys were conceived, but he wasn’t about to ask.

                “Her name’s Penny,” Draco said instead, his breath rushing out of him. He liked the name Penny—it wasn’t a traditional family name, but that was fine.

                “No, your daughter’s name is Narcissa,” Harry corrected. “Penny—Penelope—is Fred’s. “

                “You named her after my mother.”

                “Of course. Narcissa Lily,” Harry’s lips curled up and he looked incredibly fond. “After two women who loved their sons unconditionally. We call her Cissa,” he added, nodding to himself. “She’s very bright.”

                “And she’s…magical?”

                “She’s not a squib, if that’s what you’re asking,” he smiled. “We figure she’s headed straight for Ravenclaw, unlike Penny, who will almost undoubtedly be a Hufflepuff.” He looked down, nodding to himself.        

                Draco drew in his breath and sighed. “Listen, Harry. I am so, extremely sorry. I—regret everything that I said to you that night, and I regret never reconciling.”

                “I know. It’s okay,” Harry smiled lightly, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

                “It’s _not_ okay. It won’t ever be okay again. I think I’m starting to realize that, and it’s tough to swallow.”

                Caelum, Penny, and Cissa were all three digging together in the sand now. Caelum folded his legs up underneath him, copying the girls’ dainty posture, and babbled quietly away. The girls didn’t seem to mind, neither ignoring it nor making it into a conversation.

                “I’m glad you realize you were wrong,” Harry said, his sentence stilted like he couldn’t quite decide what he was going to say. “But I don’t want you to beat yourself up over it. What you said—it’s not important anymore.”

                Draco’s face turned sour, and he continued watching the kids instead of looking at Harry. He knew that he’d hurt Harry beyond repair that night, even if the boy wouldn’t admit it now (it was probably a good thing, too, because Draco may just have cried if he did), just the way Harry’s face had crumpled as he left was a good indicator of that.

                Caelum drifted over to Draco as they sat in silence, all sandy and dainty and what-have-you.

                “Cael is hungry, Draco,” he said, patting his little belly. The sand clinging to his fingers was mostly brushed off by the action.

                Draco stood, nodding to Harry. “I guess that’s my cue, then. Thanks, Harry.”

                Harry stood as well, crossing his arms. Draco noticed that he seemed to have a small baby bump, and seeing the boy pregnant for the first time made everything that much more real.

                “Why don’t you come ‘round for tea, Draco? Meet Cissa?”

                Draco bent and lifted Cael up into his arms. He turned to look at Cissa, playing happily with her sister, ruining their pretty little outfits in the wet sand. He glanced at Harry and smiled.

                “Thanks, Harry, but…I don’t think I will. I’ve got the answers I needed. She’s happy. Who am I to take that away?”

                It was, arguably, the most difficult decision of his life. But he made it.

                He turned and he gave it all up a second time. And that was okay.

_finis_


End file.
